Technology for Teaching and Learning

A few years ago, I worked with a professor to plan an interactive media component to help students with the concepts of a chemistry lab that spanned several weeks and several experiments. The professor found that students were having a hard time figuring out which data to use in what way when they reached the final experiment.

While questions as to the validity of learning style instruments can be asked, there is certainly no harm in considering the diverse learning styles of the students enrolled in your courses.  In fact, having a general awareness of learning styles can help you during the course planning and development stages.  For example, displaying bulleted PowerPoint [...]

It must be the season for predictions!  Jes posted yesterday about the Horizon Report, and there is more to come!  In the meantime, our neighbors to the north have some thoughts as well.  Sir John Daniels of Ontario’s Distance Education Network Contact North introduces three trends he thinks will have a high impact on higher [...]

  Report that is!  It has been a few years since we reviewed the Horizon Report and I thought it would be a good time to double back take a look at the predictions from 2010 and continue forward to the Horizon Report 2012. Just as a recap, The Horizon Report is published each year as a joint [...]

It’s not even a year into Google+’s life, and it already has a storied existence of battling Facebook.  But in the social media ruckus, a useful tool seemed to pop out over all the +1s—Google Hangout. Hangout is Google’s take on a conferencing web application—with it, you can create a virtual space to share video, [...]

As we approach the Sustainability poster competition, held during April – or “Earth Month” – I thought it would be appropriate to have a “green” blog post.  (Plus, even though I’m not Irish, St. Patrick’s Day is this coming weekend!)   So, how can you adopt more environmentally friendly practices into your teaching and research?   There [...]

In the book “Distance Education: A Systems View”, authors Michael Moore and Greg Kearsley discuss the various ways to deliver instruction. One statement that particularly resonated with me was the idea that “Motivation is a more critical variable than the medium…” The variety of instructional tools that are present today can provide both instructors and [...]

Late last week we added a new tool to the Blackboard 9.1 server called “Add Test Student.” This tool allows instructors to easily create a student account on the server “YOURUSERNAME_s” that you can enroll into any of your courses.  So the first question that comes to mind is: ‘Why would I want to do [...]

So you’ve toiled on a lengthy piece of text, and now you’d like to make this available to your students as a new announcement, content item, or threaded discussion in your Blackboard 9.1 site.  And let’s say you’ve really outdone yourself this time, too.  Using Microsoft Word, your page looks like a veritable Mona Lisa [...]

Several years ago – dare I say it – before blogging took off, I wrote a short piece for our TTL team e-newsletter on applying the “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education” (Chickering and Gamson, 1987) based on the follow-up “Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as a Lever” (Chickering and Erhmann, 1996).   Since [...]